‘- If you only knew how hard it is to get older! Apart from various aches and pains, apart from the fact that you want to do a lot, your head says ‘come on’, your body says ‘wait’, and hardly anyone is looking for you. Good thing you call me twice a day!’ my mother said to me one morning.
My mother was always very active. When I was little, she used to amaze me with what she did. I don’t know where she got so much energy from. She always got up at 5 am, went to work and when she came home, it was like she had a second job: her family. I sometimes thought that maybe she didn’t want to stay and think too much, life wasn’t easy and maybe she was better off just watching it out of the corner of her eye, in passing. Maybe if it looked her straight in the face, she would have had an even harder time, her soul would have struggled too much.
Her survival strategy was to keep working after she retired, until my father became seriously ill.
When someone so active has to stay home more, not going anywhere, when even meetings with neighbors are limited because times have been like this for more than a year and a half, it can be very hard.
I tried to give her another perspective by telling her that it’s not just about age, that people are all more withdrawn, that they are busy, that maybe it’s good that we make an effort to call too.
Objectivity, looking at one’s own existence from above, from the outside, helps, we put everything in context, we distance ourselves, powerful emotions are, step by step, replaced by reason.
The technique is useful if we allow ourselves to follow it, if we don’t stubbornly stay in the valley of complaint and let ourselves be guided by someone who cares about us.
This helped my mother, she accepted the challenge, she called someone, then someone else, they chatted, and she not only got out of her funk, she helped someone else climb out of said valley of complaint and take an outside look at the landscape of her days.
How do you reposition yourself when you’re having a harder time?